In need of a good laugh? A good cry? A message of comfort and joy in these particularly troubled times? Then look no further than the Pasadena Playhouse, where My Big Fat Greek Wedding star Nia Vardalos has set up house this month with her powerful stage adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things.

Book club members and film aficionados will recognize Strayed as the author of Wild, the memoir-turned-movie of her cathartic thousand-mile trek up the Pacific Crest Trail, but when the lights come up on Strayed’s expansive suburban living room/kitchen, that book’s publication remains a couple years into the future and married mom-of-two Cheryl (Vardalos) has just accepted a writing gig as an anonymous online advice columnist.

Unlike Ann Landers and her sister Abby, however, Strayed’s “Sugar” draws from her own history of heroin addiction, incestuous abuse, and her mom’s cancer death to provide empathy and hope to a series of letter writers inhabited on the Playhouse stage by Vardalos’s New York co-stars Teddy Cañez and Natalie Woolams-Torres and L.A. cast addition Giovanni Adams in dozens of age-gender-&-race-defying roles from “Confused” to “Crushed” to “Stuck” and beyond.

Letters range from the humorous (one writer can’t decide which of his three girlfriends to settle on and another wonders if the thousand-dollar tips she’s been pocketing from trysts with a married man need to be reported to the IRS) to the devastating (a miscarriage survivor finds herself incapable of overcoming the loss of her unborn child, a transgender man must deal with parental rejection), and having been through it all and survived, Cheryl is able to respond with heartfelt empathy rather than a pat set of answers.

Arriving virtually intact from its Public Theater run (Sherri Eden Barber’s astute direction is “from the original direction by Thomas Kail” and the principal design team* is composed entirely of East Coast visitors as well), Tiny Beautiful Things may not be the homegrown L.A. theater audiences are accustomed to seeing at the Pasadena Playhouse, but it’s a production well worth carbon-copying.

Like director Kail before her, Barber keeps Strayed’s letter writers on stage in her living room, whether reclining on the sofa, plopped on a chair, or helping themselves to a drink or snack from her well-stocked kitchen, thereby allowing them to become not just advice-seekers but observer/listeners as well.

Vardalos anchors the production with a performance of such radiance, compassion, and depth that it’s hard to imagine anyone else as Sugar, though I have it on good authority that alternate Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris (who takes over for Vardalos at all matinees but one and also on the final Sunday evening) is quite extraordinary in her own right.

Adams, Cañez, and Woolams-Torres create a multitude of memorable roles among them, in particular Woolams-Torres’s grieving mother and Adams’s playing-the-fielder and his rejected trans man.

Most unforgettable of all is the numbered list (in lieu of a letter that would have been too painful to write) enumerated by the remarkable Cañez as a Living Dead Dad, and the list (in lieu of a letter that might have been impossible to write) that Sugar composes in response.

Tiny Beautiful Thing’s New York-based designers give Cheryl an appropriately “lived in” living space, the onstage quartet some appropriately “at home” looks, lighting that varies subtly to match each letter’s shifting tone, and an effective sound design to complete the package.

Tiny Little Things was co-conceived by Marshall Heyman, Kail and Vardalos.

David Meyer is associate scenic designer. Jennifer Slattery is stage manager and Bonnie McHeffey is assistant stage manager. Los Angeles casting is by Nicole Arbusto, CSA. Sarah Hollis and Adam J. Smith are letter-writing alternates.

Longtime Pasadena Playhouse fans will recall Mimi Kennedy’s Ann Landers in 2008’s The Lady With All The Answers. Nia Vardalos’s “Sugar” may not be so glib about the answers she gives as Dear Abby’s twin sis was, but the advice she delivers will almost certainly have you still laughing through tears as you head home enriched by Tiny Beautiful Things.

*Jeff Croiter (lighting design), Jill BC Du Boff (sound design), Rachel Hauck (scenic design), Jennifer Moeller (costume design)

Pasadena Playhouse, 39 South El Molino Ave., Pasadena.
www.pasadenaplayhouse.org

–Steven Stanley
April 14, 2019
Photos: Jenny Graham

Tags: Cheryl Strayed, Los Angeles Theater Review, Nia Vardalos, Pasadena Playhouse